Editing

You can create a new rota directly from the navigation, or from the rota list page by clicking the green add rota button. You can change the rota name, choose a colour for the rota, and set the start and end times for the period it covers.

Your Alpaka super user will have created shifts for you, so you can add the shifts you intend to use - though you can do that at any time. You can also choose the site and department the rota is relevant to, which helps keep your rota list easy to use.

With the rota created, you can start adding team members to it, one or several at a time. Clicking the ellipsis button reveals more options, letting you find people by site, department or tags. Once you have a group of people, click the green plus button to add them to the rota.

With team members in place, you can start allocating shifts. Each time you click into a grid cell it rotates through the shifts available to you, and the last click clears the cell. You can add a shift to someone across several days quickly this way, and the tally at the bottom shows the day and week totals for each kind of shift, so with a lot of team members in a rota you can see exactly how many shifts you've allocated for a given day.

You can remove people from the rota at any time, or prune team members who don't have any shifts. Other items from a team member's schedule appear as hashed grey bars through a grid cell - this doesn't always prevent you adding a shift, but it can, depending on the block settings your Alpaka super users have set for whether you can create clashes with the schedule in your rota.

Along the top of the rota view: the ellipsis button shows more filtering options for choosing your team. Next to it, a size button changes the width of the columns in your grid, and you can scroll left and right to see the whole rota period regardless of width. The clone button takes a copy of the rota and its team and places it immediately following - so the hardest rota you'll ever build is the first one. The download button gives you an Excel file of the rota. The manual refresh button should rarely be needed, but if you suspect your team has been adding things to their schedule while you work, or someone else is editing the same rota, pressing it gets the latest information and makes sure you're not creating clashes. The notify button lets you choose an email or text message template to send to each team member in the rota, telling them how they've been allocated.

Lastly, the actions pane lets you work on the events in a rota in bulk - turning them all into draft or confirmed status, pruning team members with no shifts, or resetting the rota entirely, which removes all shifts and team members from it. If you need to remove a rota altogether, you can change its status from active to inactive, which deletes all of the events it created in everyone's schedules.